Here are 86 books that Monolith to Microservices fans have personally recommended if you like
Monolith to Microservices.
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My passion for developing production-ready, cooperating microservices began in 2008 when I first started assisting customers in creating distributed systems—long before the term “microservices” was coined. During that time, I faced significant challenges, including grappling with the “Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing”. Since then, I’ve dedicated most of my career to deepening my understanding of these complexities and finding ways to address them through robust architecture, design patterns, and the right tools.
Kubernetes is the go-to tool for orchestrating a landscape of cooperating microservices, making it a crucial skill to master.
This book guided me through Kubernetes, from the basics, such as pods, services, and deployments, to more advanced topics, like its inner workings and auto-scaling resources. What I particularly appreciate is the balance between theory and practical examples, reinforced by exercises with GitHub-hosted source code, which I also found helpful as a starting point for building real-world applications.
With Kubernetes, users don't have to worry about which specific machine in their data center their application is running on. Each layer in their application is decoupled from other layers so they can scale, update, and maintain them independently.
Kubernetes in Action teaches developers how to use Kubernetes to deploy self-healing scalable distributed applications. By the end, readers will be able to build and deploy applications in a proper way to take full advantage of the Kubernetes platform.
My passion for developing production-ready, cooperating microservices began in 2008 when I first started assisting customers in creating distributed systems—long before the term “microservices” was coined. During that time, I faced significant challenges, including grappling with the “Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing”. Since then, I’ve dedicated most of my career to deepening my understanding of these complexities and finding ways to address them through robust architecture, design patterns, and the right tools.
A common reason for microservice projects to fail is a lack of understanding of how to build resilient and fault-tolerant microservices.
This book was a game-changer for me, providing essential strategies to address these challenges. It taught me how to avoid anti-patterns like Cascading Failures and embrace patterns like Circuit Breaker and Bulkhead to manage temporary network issues and overload situations. The real-world solutions it offers were immediately applicable to my projects.
A single dramatic software failure can cost a company millions of dollars - but can be avoided with simple changes to design and architecture. This new edition of the best-selling industry standard shows you how to create systems that run longer, with fewer failures, and recover better when bad things happen. New coverage includes DevOps, microservices, and cloud-native architecture. Stability antipatterns have grown to include systemic problems in large-scale systems. This is a must-have pragmatic guide to engineering for production systems. If you're a software developer, and you don't want to get alerts every night for the rest of your…
My passion for developing production-ready, cooperating microservices began in 2008 when I first started assisting customers in creating distributed systems—long before the term “microservices” was coined. During that time, I faced significant challenges, including grappling with the “Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing”. Since then, I’ve dedicated most of my career to deepening my understanding of these complexities and finding ways to address them through robust architecture, design patterns, and the right tools.
Apache Kafka is the industry standard for real-time event streaming, an essential component for large-scale, high-performance microservice ecosystems.
Despite being new to Kafka when I read this book, it quickly brought me up to speed on key concepts that underpin its scalability and real-time capabilities, such as the commit log, topic partitions, and consumer groups. The book also introduces other critical Kafka features like the schema registry, Kafka Connect, and stream processing with Kafka Streams and ksqlDB. The practical examples provided were straightforward to apply and adapt to my own use cases.
Kafka in Action is a practical, hands-on guide to building Kafka-based data pipelines. Filled with real-world use cases and scenarios, this book probes Kafka's most common use cases, ranging from simple logging through managing streaming data systems for message routing, analytics, and more.
In systems that handle big data, streaming data, or fast data, it's important to get your data pipelines right. Apache Kafka is a wicked-fast distributed streaming platform that operates as more than just a persistent log or a flexible message queue.
My passion for developing production-ready, cooperating microservices began in 2008 when I first started assisting customers in creating distributed systems—long before the term “microservices” was coined. During that time, I faced significant challenges, including grappling with the “Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing”. Since then, I’ve dedicated most of my career to deepening my understanding of these complexities and finding ways to address them through robust architecture, design patterns, and the right tools.
Understanding how requests and messages traverse a large microservice landscape is notoriously challenging. The CNCF OpenTelemetry framework standardizes how to collect and observe telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces).
This book was invaluable in helping me grasp OpenTelemetry’s core concepts and architecture, including collectors and exporters, and how to instrument applications effectively. It also helped me understand how distributed tracing data is structured into traces and spans and how to propagate context information between cooperating microservices.
OpenTelemetry is a revolution in observability data. Instead of running multiple uncoordinated pipelines, OpenTelemetry provides users with a single integrated stream of data, providing multiple sources of high-quality telemetry data: tracing, metrics, logs, RUM, eBPF, and more. This practical guide shows you how to set up, operate, and troubleshoot the OpenTelemetry observability system.
Authors Austin Parker, head of developer relations at Lightstep and OpenTelemetry Community Maintainer, and Ted Young, cofounder of the OpenTelemetry project, cover every OpenTelemetry component, as well as observability best practices for many popular cloud, platform, and data services such as Kubernetes and AWS Lambda. You'll learn…
I’ve been a software architect for a very long time. I love hard problems, and I’m very passionate about collaborating with others to find the right solution to them. Software architecture is a challenging, multi-faceted discipline with very few resources to help you make the right decisions. That’s why I’m recommending these books on software architecture. These books helped me become a more effective software architect, and I hope they can help you become more effective as well.
This book was very influential in my career as a software architect because it was the first “technical” book I read that finally focused on the people and leadership skills of being an architect.
It was also the first book I read that made me start to think more about the intersection of agile and architecture, something they also devote an entire chapter to. While a bit outdated in today’s world, the authors hit the nail on the head with the still-relevant chapters on thought leadership, agility, and software architecture modeling.
In A Practical Guide to Enterprise Architecture, six leading experts present indispensable technical, process, and business insight into every aspect of enterprise architecture. You'll find start-to-finish guidance for architecting effective system, software, and service-oriented architectures; using product lines to streamline enterprise software design; leveraging powerful agile modeling techniques; extending the Unified Process to the full software lifecycle; architecting presentation tiers and user experience; and driving the technical direction of the entire enterprise. For every working architect and every IT professional who wants to become one.
As a computer science professor and educator, my teaching motto is Rigor and Vigor. I believe that the only way to learn something deeply, whether it's an abstract mathematical argument or a complex computer system – is building the thing from the ground up, from first principles. That's the rigor. The second requirement – vigor – comes from the need to make this learning experience captivating, rewarding, empowering. I spent much of my career developing books, courses, and games that help learn computer science and mathematics with gusto. I am pleased that this work has had an impact, and that it resonates with many students and self-learners around the world.
Computer architectures have historically followed two paradigms: CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computing) and its later contender RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing).
RISC processors, which presently power most smartphones, tablets, and IoT devices, were pioneered by Cocke, and later by Patterson and Hennessy – all winners of the Turing Award. Patterson and Hennessy’s classical book series Computer Organization and Design became the go-to textbooks in many academic computer architecture courses.
When reading these books, I enjoy the direct connection with the architects of the systems described. And, I appreciate the numerous insights about compilation, systems, and engineering at large, and the generous and balanced comparisons with competing, non-RISC architectures.
Computer Organization and Design RISC-V Edition: The Hardware Software Interface, Second Edition, the award-winning textbook from Patterson and Hennessy that is used by more than 40,000 students per year, continues to present the most comprehensive and readable introduction to this core computer science topic. This version of the book features the RISC-V open source instruction set architecture, the first open source architecture designed for use in modern computing environments such as cloud computing, mobile devices, and other embedded systems. Readers will enjoy an online companion website that provides advanced content for further study, appendices, glossary, references, links to software tools,…
I have been working with computers for decades now – having started with programmable handheld calculators and working my way up and down through mainframes, mini- and micro-computers. I always thought there is an art to writing software, and that good software can be read and admired. Maintainability, readability, and testability are some core needs for software, and after going through many programming paradigms, I feel that functional programming (FP) is the way to go – and several modern web frameworks agree. JavaScript (and now, TypeScript) are essential to web development, and I wanted to show how FP could be successfully used with those languages, and thus my book.
Of all the books I recommend, this is practically a sort of personal bible, which I very frequently consult.
This book doesn't just show you how to code; with realistic patterns and real-world examples, it's like having experienced mentors guiding your every keystroke. These patterns aren't just snippets; they're blueprints for building robust, flexible software.
I think the book is practically mandatory for all developers, novice or seasoned. It transformed how I approach problems, teaching me techniques I use daily in systems design and development.
Capturing a wealth of experience about the design of object-oriented software, four top-notch designers present a catalog of simple and succinct solutions to commonly occurring design problems. Previously undocumented, these 23 patterns allow designers to create more flexible, elegant, and ultimately reusable designs without having to rediscover the design solutions themselves.
The authors begin by describing what patterns are and how they can help you design object-oriented software. They then go on to systematically name, explain, evaluate, and catalog recurring designs in object-oriented systems. With Design Patterns as your guide, you will learn how these important patterns fit into the…
I’m a professional software developer for more than 22 years now. I’ve used many programming languages, platforms, frameworks, etc. throughout my career. However, the only constant for me personally was the practice of Test-Driven Development. I’ve never stopped learning about the principles and practices behind it, and it paid huge dividends throughout my career. I’m very humbled and grateful to be able to learn from all those amazing people over the years, that I decided to write a book on the topic. Giving back some of the knowledge that I gathered about TDD throughout 18+ years.
This is the most complete and exhaustive reference book when it comes to test automation. It’s a massive book that’s got pretty much all bases covered: test patterns, test strategies, test smells, test practices, etc. … It’s all there. If you want to get a feel about what’s covered, check out the xUnit Test Patterns website. This book provides all the information to become an expert at all kinds of automated tests. It requires a lot of effort to process the content, but it’s definitely all worth it!
Software testing has received renewed attention with the widespread adoption of Extreme Programming and other agile methodologies. While testing does not directly improve the quality of software, the under-appreciated practice provides a timely and accurate measurement (a reality check) so that the reader knows whether any new action needs to be taken. Automated software testing is used to ensure that once the software works, it is not accidentally broken during subsequent software development or maintenance activities. This book describes patterns for writing automated tests using the XUnit family (e.g., JUnit and NUnit) of test automation frameworks. The author uses the…
I’ve always enjoyed mentoring folks whether new or experienced in programming. Whether it is teaching an intern or a high school robotics student, or onboarding an experienced Java developer, it brings me joy to see people learn. I also love to read. Being able to recommend some of my favorite books can help even more people absorb all of this information.
In addition to Java, you need to know about the Java ecosystem.
Each chapter covers a type of tool like version control, securing binaries, or mobile. Some chapters cover a variety of tools. I particularly liked the overview of Quarkus and Micronaut. I also liked the emphasis of tools vs a role. The analogies were great such as comparing identify/fix/deploy to an oil spill.
The book is 300 pages and easy to carry around. Despite having four authors, the book is very cohesive and reads well.
With the rise of DevOps, low-cost cloud computing, and container technologies, the way Java developers approach development today has changed dramatically. This practical guide helps you take advantage of microservices, serverless, and cloud native technologies using the latest DevOps techniques to simplify your build process and create hyperproductive teams.
Stephen Chin, Melissa McKay, Ixchel Ruiz, and Baruch Sadogursky from JFrog help you evaluate an array of options. The list includes source control with Git, build declaration with Maven and Gradle, CI/CD with CircleCI, package management with Artifactory, containerization with Docker and Kubernetes, and much more. Whether you're building applications with…
I’ve always enjoyed mentoring folks whether new or experienced in programming. Whether it is teaching an intern or a high school robotics student, or onboarding an experienced Java developer, it brings me joy to see people learn. I also love to read. Being able to recommend some of my favorite books can help even more people absorb all of this information.
When trying to become a better Java developer, there is so much to learn.
97 Things covers, well 97, of them in a series of brief essays. What’s cool is that the essays were written by different people so you get lots of points of view on what is important. Topics range from language (comments, fat jars) to the ecosystem (benchmarking, frequent releases) to the language-agnostic (definition of done and breaking down problems.)
Note that two of these are mine. The book is thin at just over 200 pieces. And since each “thing” is short, it’s easy to read on the go.
If you want to push your Java skills to the next level, this book provides expert advice from Java leaders and practitioners. You'll be encouraged to look at problems in new ways, take broader responsibility for your work, stretch yourself by learning new techniques, and become as good at the entire craft of development as you possibly can
Edited by Kevlin Henney and Trisha Gee, 97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know reflects lifetimes of experience writing Java software and living with the process of software development. Great programmers share their collected wisdom to help you rethink Java practices, whether…
